My 2015 till receipt

While sorting through some things, I came across my entry ticket and receipt from the Delacroix and Antiquity exhibition. I pictured myself back in those rooms, in front of the canvases, and other memories came flooding back.

In France, paper receipts disappeared from tills in 2023, unless the customer specifically asks for one. Since then, customers receive an email, a text message, sometimes a QR code. Gone, too, is the receipt I used to find at the bottom of my pocket or bag, but it is undeniably greener.

Digitalisation is now reaching businesses too, and the two countries in which I work made the shift in the same year.

In Belgium, the transition took place on 1 January 2026 for all VAT-registered businesses, whatever their size. Since then, they have been required to issue and receive structured electronic invoices via the Peppol network. No one – sole traders, SMEs or large companies – has been exempt from the timetable, with fines of up to 5,000 euros for non-compliance.

In France, since 1 September 2026, all businesses have been required to receive electronic invoices. Large and mid-sized companies have had to issue them since that date, while SMEs, micro-businesses and sole traders will follow in September 2027.

The electronic invoice is traceable and transmitted via approved platforms. The transition raises legitimate questions: the security of the platforms and dependence on third-party systems. Above all, the central question is who owns and controls the data. These questions deserve to be asked, even if the answers will come with time and use.

The philosopher Paul Ricœur distinguished between two kinds of memory (in Memory, History, Forgetting): the one we carry within us, alive and personal, and the one we entrust to the outside world – archived, filed, accessible, yet no longer truly ours. My Louvre ticket belongs to the first; my invoice, now stored on a server, to the second.